From the publisher

Parma Eldalamberon 'The Book of Elven-tongues' is a journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, a special interest group of the Mythopoeic Society. This issue has two sections containing newly published writings by J.R.R. Tolkien: "The Alphabet of Rumil" edited by Arden R. Smith; and "Early Noldorin Fragments" edited by Christopher Gilson, Bill Welden, Carl F. Hostetter, and Patrick Wynne. Both of these have been prepared with the guidance of Christopher Tolkien and with the permission of the Tolkien Estate.

The Rúmilian Sarati are the earliest of the Elvish writing systems devised by Tolkien, ultimately envisioned as the historical precursor to the Feanorian Tengwar, the Elvish script seen in The Lord of the Rings. "The Alphabet of Rúmil" is an edition of Tolkien's Rúmilian writings, with examples of the script reproduced in fascimile, including charts of the sounds represented by the letters, and both Elvish and English texts written in Rúmilian. Transcriptions of these texts and detailed commentary on the chronology of the documents and evolution of the conception of the writing system are included in this edition.

"Early Noldorin Fragments" is a collection of Tolkien's word-lists and grammatical descriptions of the Noldorin language from the 1920s. These trace the evolution the language from its beginnings as the Goldogrin of the "Gnomish Lexicon" to its conception as the Exilic Noldorin that would appear in "The Etymologies". These writings reveal the emergence of significant conceptual details, such the use of vowel mutation to mark Noldorin plural nouns, and the place of Old Noldorin in the internal history of the language. Detailed annotations and commentary on these conceptual developments in the documents are included in this edition.